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American grit was essential to getting Northern Ireland’s warring sides to make peace 25 years ago with the Good Friday Agreement.
President Joe Biden arrived in Belfast Tuesday evening to celebrate that anniversary, but few expect him to resolve a new political crisis that has rattled the peace deal and put Northern Ireland’s government on ice.
Biden was greeted at Belfast International Airport by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and will hold talks with the British leader and representatives of Northern Ireland’s fractious political parties on a trip to Northern Ireland whose main goal, the president said as he boarded Air Force One, is to “keep the peace.”
But he’s not scheduled to visit Stormont, seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly. It has been suspended since the Democratic Unionist Party, which formed half of a power-sharing government, walked out a year ago over a post-Brexit trade dispute.
The president is spending less than 24 hours in Northern Ireland before moving on to the Republic of Ireland, where he will address the Dublin parliament, attend a gala banquet and visit a brace of ancestral hometowns in the east and west of the country during a three-day visit.
Katy Hayward, professor of political sociology at Queen’s University Belfast, said Biden’s visit is a “recognition that the peace process isn’t in a good place, but (also) to remind us of the achievements of the past 25 years.”
“President Biden is continuing on in a long tradition of American presidents who’ve maintained an interest in the peace process in Northern Ireland,” she said. “They see themselves as co-guarantors of the Good Friday Belfast Agreement, which means that they are particularly keen to see the British-Irish relationship be a good one and a close one.”
American intervention played a key role in ending Northern Ireland’s “Troubles,” three decades of violence in which 3,600 people died.
